


Closed Loop

by primeideal



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Biblical References, Book: Doomsday Book, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 14:13:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19975408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/pseuds/primeideal
Summary: Up in the sky there was a noise like “This is my kid, who I love a lot and am super proud of.”- Matthew 3:17, People’s Modern Bible translation





	Closed Loop

The translator could not make out every one of Lady Imeyne's words, but Kivrin heard enough to understand the gist. She was a stranger, but appeared wealthy, aristocratic. Her arrival was not a burden, but an opportunity. Why, by saving her life and tending her wounds, Lady Imeyne and Sir Gawyn might win riches and glory for their families!

Above all, one thing was clear—Imeyne had no desire for her to be treated by the simple village priest, Father Roche. “Why, he can barely say his prayers,” Imeyne scoffed. “He speaks Latin as if to the dog. And his healing is worse!”

“It is well that he tended her,” Eliwys pushed back. So, she was not afraid to challenge her—mother? mother-in-law? “I would not have seen you catch ill from her.”

“’Tis a pity God did not see fit to snatch him up into his eternal embrace!” Imeyne protested. “Ashencote may be small, aye, but is it so pitiful that the bishop should disgrace us with an unlearned priest?”

_Ashencote_. Was that the name of the village? She had not come across it in the Domesday Book, but perhaps it had been lost in the Black Death.

Would be lost, Kivrin checked herself. She was in 1320, and any plague that would ravage the continent was still a distant future.

“Do not fret yourself,” said Eliwys. “Tell me if she cries out. Till then, I must meet with Gawyn.”

“Gawyn!” Kivrin echoed. Had he been the one who rescued her from the drop? Would he know where to lead her? But the translator was still calibrating, and it came out unrecognizable to the contemps.

“Ah, she is mad,” said Eliwys. “Fever or no fever, she needs to rest.”

And Kivrin was too exhausted to protest as sleep took her once more.

* * *

Despite the best efforts of William Gaddson and his colleagues, it was impossible to get a moment alone with Badri. One busybody or another insisted on keeping watch when the technician was energetic enough to sit upright and try to converse, in the fear he would overexert himself.

As usual, however, Mr. Dunworthy’s conversations quickly got too technical for most laypeople. This had gotten him into trouble more often than it helped, but on this occasion he was grateful not to be interrupted as Badri weakly explained the circumstances. “There’s a backup.”

“A backup!” After all his fruitless efforts, Badri had been trying to get through to him all along. “How quickly can you run it?”

“How quickly can they discharge me?” Badri asked. He smiled, but that turned into a cough.

“Ssh, ssh, it’s all right,” Dunworthy said, not really believing it. Kivrin was out of his hands, he reminded himself. She had always made the journey, it had been unchangeable fact for seven centuries. And yet…

“The coordinates are the faulty ones, set for 1348. But when you run a restored file, you don’t—you don’t have the same quantum seedings as before. They’re independent events.”

“That’s right,” said Dunworthy, more out of gratitude to see Badri lucid than remembering enough of the details to agree.

Luckily, Badri was used to expounding minutiae. “They’d run the risk of slippage. _No_ more than the scaled maximum—six months at most, probably two or less—but all the same, a second drop could miss her.”

He said _they_ , as if Dunworthy would send anyone else after Kivrin, as if he could watch anyone else be hurled into the past, unable to protect them. “Six months. Not twenty-eight years.”

“No.”

Dunworthy nodded. “Call me as soon as you’re on your feet. I need those coordinates.”

* * *

_From the Doomsday Book. Date unknown. Estimated 19 December 1320._

It’s easy to forget how the contemps can be petty and judgmental—not in an uneducated or foolish way, but just like us. Despite all the backbreaking work of cooking and cleaning and caring for the animals, they still have time to snipe over Gawyn’s glances at Lady Eliwys. Imeyne’s tone of voice when she talks about a nicety or custom that Father Roche forgot is exactly the same as Professor Pak going on about nineteenth-century poets. Or am I projecting onto her with my translator, unable to imagine any feuds but my own?

* * *

Lady Katherine was the most interesting person Agnes had ever met. She spoke in tongues like the saints, and had survived being attacked by bandits, and she knew all kinds of mysterious things. But she didn’t know how to find her way around Ashencote or when Agnes’ father was coming home or how to make a Christmas feast. So Agnes got to help her and tell her things. She was being _useful_ , like Grandmother always asked. Like a good daughter.

She would be a good wife someday, too, she knew. But not yet. Not until she was all grown-up, like Rosemund.

Lady Katherine went into the church because she was brave and wanted to keep Agnes safe from the wicked man. Agnes wasn’t scared, not really. Blackie could fight off any wicked man, she figured. Except Mother insisted that Blackie stay home so he didn’t catch his death of cold.

But then Lady Katherine was outside and looking sad. “Are you okay?” Agnes asked.

“I am well,” said Katherine.

“What about the wicked man, where is he?”

“There was no wicked man,” Katherine said. “Only Roche.”

“Did Roche kill the wicked man?”

“Agnes! Mind your tongue. What would your grandmother say if she heard you speaking ill of a priest?”

“She’d say, _get inside and do your chores_ ,” Agnes responded, and Lady Katherine laughed.

“Father Roche is mighty big,” Agnes went on. “And he has a big scar on his cheek. That’s why Grandmother doesn’t like him, I think, bedcause he looks scary.”

“Is that so?”

“Mmhmm. He got it fighting a wolf.”

“A wolf?”

“Sure. Rosemund told me, and Gawyn told her, Gawyn fought the wolf after Roche was safe and away. He skinned it to make a coat, but then he gave the coat to my father so that’s why I can’t show you.” The nice thing about meeting new people was that they didn’t know any of your stories!

It had been nice when Father Roche had come to Ashencote. Agnes had been ready to introduce him to everyone, too. But Mother said that he was busy talking to God, and Grandmother said that she needed to be a big girl and do her chores.

Katherine, though, she was a good listener. She gave Agnes a big smile as they walked outside to find the priest’s donkey.

* * *

In the midst of the plague, Dunworthy rushed to memorize verbs and practice going without showering, vaccinating himself with everything Kivrin had been prescribed and then some. It was frivolous to invest so much into this search for his lost child, when the world was collapsing again. It was his duty.

“Well,” Colin bluntly summarized, “if you wanna _look_ like a smelly old peasant, you’re off to a good start.”

Part of Dunworthy reminded himself that he had an entire university library at his disposal, and even despite the quarantine locking down most of Oxford’s main repositories, the digital archives provided more than enough information. Another part of him wanted nothing more than to reach for Colin’s garishly illustrated guide to the Middle Ages. Both because it was right _there_ , something tangible that could help him understand what Kivrin was going through, and because he could use it to hit the impertinent child over the head.

“If you die,” Colin went on, “bagsy your office.”

“ _Colin_.”

“What? I’m not going back to Aunt Mary’s, it’s boring. You probably have old books and stuff. And a good computer. Necrotic!”

“We’d both better hope not,” said Dunworthy. “Tell you what. I’m going to need someone to help me, to practice going to the fourteenth century.”

“You can’t trick me into translating Latin,” Colin said. “I’m not _that_ stupid.”

Dunworthy did not want to admit how much he could have used his help. Colin was young, his mind agile and open to absorbing new languages like they were viruses. Dunworthy himself was old, set in his ways.

Only in her absence could he admit that Kivrin was better-prepared than he could ever be. In the pains the university— _parts_ of the university—had taken to get things right and prepare her against every imaginable precaution, even the infections that lurked three decades off course. And also in her willingness to adapt, her commitment to making the best of wherever she landed. Why, he might be more hindrance than help, too single-minded to record the history around him.

And still he pressed on. He’d come too far to think of _not_ turning back, to the task that lay before and behind him.

* * *

Fulke the clerk’s head burned with fever, and his arms were swollen with pestilence. Silently, he thanked God that his comrades had left the city, that they could not catch sick from him. Aloud, the words of the requiem flew to his lips.

Roche approached him without fear. Kind of the village priest, to see to not only his flock, but his ailing guest. But the woman, Lady Katherine, she bade the others flee. Was she some kind of caretaker or nurse? Her dress suggested a family of status, or at the very least that she’d come to wealth somehow.

Or, perhaps, she was just addled in the head. “What year is it?” she asked, as if she did not know how long King Edward had ruled in strength and wisdom. It was the year of the lord, he told her, 1348.

“Stay away,” Katherine demanded. “Do not go near him, do not touch him. He is ill with the curse of the fleas, the blue sickness. If you come too close, you may die as well.”

As well. Was he already dead, then, and being tormented by the evil one? The buboes on his skin, the pain in his body. These were the agonies that the rich man endured, seeing Lazarus in the arms of Abraham. He, Fulke, who had once been a bishop’s attendant, suffered in hell, while Roche the simple tended to his duties.

“He will need the sacraments,” Roche was saying. “And someone to tend him if he stirs.”

“You cannot,” Katherine railed. “You cannot be close to him—he _brought_ the plague here, damnit! God _damn_ him!”

_He already has_ , Fulke thought, but his throat was too anguished to speak.

“I do not fear his affliction,” Roche said. “We do but go home again.”

Katherine was clearly of no mind to let him minister, but she shooed Imeyne’s household out of the room before Fulke could make out her indistinct reply. He groaned, turned over in the bed, and prayed for sleep.

She must have lost the ensuing argument, because when Fulke awoke, Roche was kneeling beside him.

* * *

“Why can’t I go with you?” Colin pleaded.

_Because I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you._ “Because I don’t know when I’ll come out,” Dunworthy answered. “There could be more slippage.”

“But Badri said I could come with him, he _said—_ ”

“Badri isn’t going through time. He’s just opening a drop. Like...like when you clear the fog from your breath off a window. You can see through the other side, then, but that’s not the same as opening the window.”

“So I’ll see you. In the Middle Ages.”

“Me and Kivrin,” said Dunworthy. “When we come back through, yes.” He did not allow himself to consider the possibility that he would not find her. What reason would there be to come back, then? Oxford had already lost Mary and Gilchrist, and God only knew what had become of Basingame. They could get along well enough without him.

“Why can’t you just grab her when _she_ gets there and back you go?”

_Because I might miss her. Or I might get there early and freeze to death waiting half a year for her to show up._ “The drop that I’m going through is a copy of the one that sent her. It only goes _out_. The drop Badri’s making, that you get to watch, it only sends people _here_.”

“Like the up and down escalators on the Tube.”

“Yes,” Dunworthy said, “exactly that.” Well, there probably were mechanisms that let the station operators reverse the direction of the train. Maybe someday, when Oxford had gotten more practice, there’d be better time-travel protocols too. Where were the voyagers from the future? Why hadn’t they come to show him what they knew, to ease his way?

_Because the twenty-first century’s another ten_ , he concluded. Humanity would not send their children into the maw of the new-and-ancient strains. Not if they were anything like him.

* * *

_From the Doomsday Book. Date unknown. Estimated 1 January 1349._

The Plague wiped out a third of Europe, maybe a half. How many more villages like this, utterly forgotten by the cartographers? Scarcely as soon as Roche has tolled the bell does it fade away in the wind, and I do not know if there is anyone left in the adjacent towns to hear it.

He tells me not to lose hope, that God will watch over us. That Agnes’ suffering is over, and that neither space nor time can separate us from the father’s love. I do not know how he can stand it, but I am too tired to argue back.

* * *

“We must go to Scotland,” Kivrin said.

“Scotland?” Roche echoed. “Nay, we cannot to Scotland.”

“What, then?” she snapped.

“First I must ring the bell for Rosemund.”

Kivrin could only nod. “I’ll get the donkey.”

As she was gathering the supplies, she heard a single toll of the bell, then nothing. Though Bloet and Lord Guillaume had thought Rosemund a woman of marriageable age, Roche knew as well as Kivrin did that she was but a child. Ahead of his time.

But by the time she was ready, Roche was asleep. He stirred fitfully as Kivrin touched his forehead. It was hot.

“No,” she pleaded. “No, curse you. Not him too.”

“It is but a relapse,” he murmured. Was her translation device continuing to improve?

“Have you had this before?” she asked. “The blue sickness?”

“Blue?” he echoed. “Not blue. Oh, Mary, Mary, forgive me...”

He was praying to the Virgin Mary. “ _Ave Maria,_ ” she began, clasping his hand, “full of grace...pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

Roche seemed to settle into a deeper sleep, and she retreated to make recordings without waking him. There was little to say, and yet everything seemed to take on a new prominence. Agnes, searching for her puppy. Rosemund, no longer afraid of Bloet. The steward, surrendering to despair within his own grave.

In the morning, mercifully, Roche’s fever had receded slightly. “I am ready,” he said, “for whatever befalls. We must go.”

“Not to Scotland, not yet,” said Katherine. “Wait until you’re stronger.”

“We have not time to go to Scotland,” he said. “You must return to the place from which you come.”

“From which I come?”

“I—you appeared near the fork. Where we journeyed with Agnes, and the donkey. Let us—” He heaved a cough. “Let us go at once, and see this thing that has been made known.”

Roche. He had known where the drop was, all along. “Are you sure you can walk?”

“I am not sure,” he admitted. “No one knows but God. Yet I would not tarry.”

They walked past the road they had taken with Agnes and Rosemund, out to the holly tree, and she thought of the irrepressible carolers of Oxford. _Oh the first tree in the greenwood, it was the holly._ Sometimes Roche grew too weak to walk and he leaned on her for strength, and other times he urged her onward, gesturing and repeating directions in case he could not go no further.

“I will not leave without you,” she promised. She’d missed the drop, at any rate; it was too late to go back. Yet he thought her a saint, to sustain his faith in the last days, and she found that she could not deny him that hope even in her grief.

She started to hear the sound of bells, and there was a blur in the air, as if the snowflakes were melting before they had fully fallen. “Kivrin,” Roche was saying, and his accent was strange as if echoing from far away. “Kivrin, now—”

There was a young child, and Badri was craning over her, and the sound of handbells ringing faster and keener than the great tower bells she had known.

“Is that her?” the boy asked.

“That’s her,” said Roche, and it was Dunworthy’s voice, Dunworthy who had been beside her the whole time, from whom nothing could separate her. “That’s my Kivrin.”


End file.
